 In 1790, citizenship was defined as free, white, and male. That's the first naturalization act in the United States, free, white, and male. Many people in this room would not be considered citizens in 1790. And it's only been through the collective action and struggle of protest, activism, and uprising that that definition has come to be expanded to include many of the faces that we see in this room, to include my ancestors, to include myself. I am descendant of artists Lloyd and Zelma Jones, who migrated here during the Second World War. Neither they could not read. They were sharecroppers. And my mother had me. She was a first born here. And so this is how close a lot of this history is. And so it's exciting for me to think about the possibilities that are present now amongst all the turmoil that we're experiencing. Going back to 1790, enslaved African and African Americans from the very beginning, pretty much from 1640 onward, were fundamentally denied citizenship in this country. They were through a series of laws, implemented colony by colony, and then state by state. They were stripped of their right to citizenship, which denied them rights to protection under the law. If we go forward, I wanted us to think, well, what is a civil right? And what caused the modern day civil rights movement? Typically, the civil rights movement, we equate with 1954, Brown versus Board, and then the passage of the Civil Rights Act. And we're all good, right? Barack Obama is our president. We live in a post-racial society. The reality of what we've been seeing in the urban centers in particular, the issues brought forward by the Movement for Black Lives, show us that many of the issues that remain after in the post-war America in the late 60s and early 70s show that we still have a lot of work to do. So when we look at civil rights, a basic civil right, this is a basic definition. Its protection from discriminatory treatment are the rights of a citizen. But as I've pointed out, citizenship has been denied to many and often defined very narrowly. And now we're in a period where citizenship again is under scrutiny and under question, right? So it is only through struggle and social movements for civil rights that citizenship has become more inclusive. It has always been taken, never given, I argue, in this country. And while certain groups are able to move up the social ranks, so to speak, through struggles, right? Others have been systematically denied that right, henceforth creating the need for a civil rights movement. So if we look at modern civil rights, and I kind of gave this timeline already, we have World War II, the Double V for Victory campaign, really galvanizing and placing the expectations of African-Americans much higher. African-Americans have fought in every single war in this country, right? Before the United States was even the United States of America. However, during World War I, the closed ranks, Du Bois asked African-Americans to close ranks and put their special grievances aside. And they did answer that call to duty, but they returned home to violence, they returned home to segregation. And so they returned fighting, as Du Bois stated. During World War II, that energy would be reinvigorated during the Double V for Victory campaign, which was about victory over our enemies abroad, but also victory over the oppression that African-Americans experienced at home, fighting in segregated regiments, not being allowed to even sit down at the same counter with their comrades when they returned after risking their lives to fight for democracy. So in a lot of ways, African-Americans have utilized the wartime atmosphere to highlight that inherent contradiction between the United States fighting for democracy overseas, but systematically denying that to their own citizens at home. World War II brings the African-American community to the San Francisco Bay Area. As I said before, my grandparents came here during the late 40s, mid to late 40s. They were sharecroppers. They were domestic workers. They were farmers. They started businesses. My aunt had a restaurant here, Mulls Health Kitchen. I had to shout it out, you know? And they took leaps of faith into the unknown, as Isabel Workison says, and tried to start a new life, thinking generationally for Pete for myself. And so it's the second wave of the great migration that brings the black population here, largely situated in the Fillmore District and also in the Hunters Point region. But it's not just about looking at African-Americans coming. We also have to recognize that Japanese people are being interned at the same time that African-Americans were coming in. So you have all these push and pull factors. And what I want us to do today is to try to draw these larger connections, right? And in a lot of ways, the narrative centered around the great migration has been African-Americans were escaping the evils of the South and in many ways they were. But what they found in the North and in the West was a new kind of Jim Crow that was equally as effective and in many ways more invisible which makes it more insidious in a lot of ways. It was built into the systems. It was built into the institutions. It was built into the hiring practices. And in a lot of ways, what I found in San Francisco, there was a racial order. As long as a black population was small, we don't need the black and white signs. You stay in your pocket over here as long as you don't try to push your fine. But with the huge influx of African-Americans during the World War II era, that shifted and forced San Francisco and the larger San Francisco Bay Area to grapple with issues that they didn't hadn't necessarily dealt with before. So that's important. So I think that what I'm trying to show is that systemic racial discrimination was not just a Southern problem and that the larger master narratives of civil rights has been just packaged between the Brown versus Board and the Civil Rights Act of 64. But there's an unconscious equation of the defeat of Southern Jim Crow with the end of Jim Crow in America period. And that's not true. Moreover, as I stated already, the North and South binary has hidden the ways that Jim Crow operates in the West, particularly in a place like San Francisco, in a place that treasures its diversity, that has an economic investment in maintaining its liberal stance, right? In ideological investment, it's a part of the city's identity. But I always say, while we all may be able to get on the bus together, we still get off in our segregated neighborhoods, we still go to our little pockets and those lines remain. And moreover, the North-South binary of civil rights to me has hidden the way of Jim Crow in the West. The West has not talked about. When we talk about civil rights, we talk about the East Coast. We talk about Chicago. We talk about Harlem. But what about San Francisco? This is the home of the First School of Ethnic Studies. Eight minutes away across the bridge is the home of the Black Panther Party. But where is San Francisco in that? Where do we fit? And that's a question I want us to think about. There was a movement in the Bay Area that I don't think is recognized in the larger history of civil rights, the larger narratives. And little bits and pieces are taken as I stated before. And the history of civil rights in San Francisco can be, I think what's important about this work, it can be used as a framework to better understand America in its present moment with all its increasing diversity and changing demographics. So San Francisco to me is a microcosm of both the possibility and the reality that we are faced with. Also the overlapping and often intertwined struggles for freedom and equality in the Bay Area really are something that is unique, but also again reflective of the larger changing demographics of this country. I think it's not only the activism that we see here is not only a model for bringing about social change and alliance building we're created here, but I also think it's their important lessons that we can use to move forward. So those are some of the reasons why we're here today and I'll revisit those things as we go forward. So I wanted to start off in 1963. Now the 60s were a very tumultuous time and we'll talk about that context in a little bit. In Mel's Drive-In, Mel's Diner, there's one down the street, we've all eaten there before, yes, or maybe heard of it, we all familiar, right? In 1963, this popular San Francisco eatery, which opened in 1947, had a practice of only hiring African-Americans as cooks and as dishwashers. Groups of students organized and they formed a group called the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination. They picketed originally at the owner's home in St. Francis Wood, which is very interesting to me. Group of students picketing in this very sort of upper class community and students are important. I work with students every day and I tell my students all the time that the social change of the 60s, the energy, the fuel for that was students, student leaders coming together. So young people and the power of young people coming together is something that I also wanna highlight and that's what you see here. Students from UC Berkeley and San Francisco State came together to stage sit-ins, which were the largest of its kind that happened in this city before. What's also interesting is these weren't just African-American students, these were white students, these were black students, these were Latino students. And I think whenever I take the research to other places, people are surprised by the number of white students involved in the protests. Because when we think of somebody fighting for black rights, we automatically think of black people. So I also challenge us to stretch our definitions of who is an activist and who is a protester. It's not just a person with a fist in the air and a black beret, right? They took on many shades and that's important for us. I'm not speaking literally either in regards to shades. Soon after, the sit-ins lasted for about a month and again, this was an unspoken practice. It wasn't one that was documented. It was in reality, it was not necessarily sanctioned by the law and so soon after these sit-ins staged here, the restaurant began to open all the positions to people of color, particularly African-Americans. So as a direct result of the student activism in 63, to challenge the discriminatory hiring practices in the Mel's diners, which there were 13 in the city of San Francisco, students were able to make headway and create economic opportunities for African-Americans in the city. And that's important to me. I just wanna show you a few little pictures. Don't drive in, drive out discrimination. This is an image of a sit-in, students at the Mel's drive in. Alliance building is important for us to keep in mind. And again, the significance of San Francisco State and UC Berkeley, which we'll come to. College campus is really playing a big role. And also shifting that narrative, who's an activist, it was not uncommon in the San Francisco Bay Area to see people from all walks of life protesting against discriminatory practices, as you see in this sign. Where are the Negroes, waitresses? And you guys can see that the protesters here are not people that, even in my own mind, that I might see walking on a picket line, right? And that's one of the things that's unique about the San Francisco Bay Area. You had that activism, but it was very much interconnected. Students from all walks of life saw how their struggles intertwined and mobilized and essentially helped to create a movement. So moving on from 63, those same students, many of whom also went to San Francisco State, UC Berkeley, staged a demonstration at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco in March of 64. And let me move this up a little bit so you can see it. Okay, again, they were protesting against the discriminatory hiring practices. Actually, the Palace Hotel was once a great source of employment, but after the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915, many of those workers or employees were replaced with white workers to give this presence. People were worried about how people, would they be comfortable with black maids coming to their rooms and those things. This was a very large demonstration. So over 1,500 demonstrators were at the Palace Hotel. There were 200 arrests and it was the largest master rest in San Francisco history again up until that point. So I argue that really coming from the mid to late 1950s, there was a momentum that was building and the context of the 1960s snowballed and as more youth became mobilized and as the tone of the civil rights movement changed, there was a genuine civil rights movement that was happening here in the Bay Area that would eventually transform the whole country, but we'll get there. Through negotiations, the hotel agreed to do these three. Increase a total number of minority employment levels, inform civil rights groups of infringements of minority employees or hiring, and also, excuse me, spelling and also to provide periodical statistical analysis of employees in all of the jobs. So there were again direct gains and achievements made from the activism of students centered around both the Melz diners and the Palace Hotel demonstration. So that's 63, 64. You guys with me? Yeah? Okay, let's keep going. Oh, let's look at some pictures. I like, I'm very visual. So I think history doesn't have to be spoken or read. We have some amazing footage here at this library, little plug to San Francisco Public Library. So you guys can see these are signs and slogans that we often associate with places like Selma, but those songs were chanted here, those songs rang true here. And again, notice who are the protesters? Are they black? Are they white? Or is it a mix? So demographically speaking, who is an activist? Who is a protester in our minds versus the reality of what that was in the Bay Area? Here is an image of student demonstrators in the Palace Hotel being arrested. Again, many of these students are from UC Berkeley in San Francisco State, all for the purpose of trying to increase the hiring of African-Americans in these places. Sure, can't see them. These signs here? Man. No, no problem. The signs of the, so I'll read the signs. Sure, ain't gonna let no one turn me around. That's one sign. Is the Palace part of the free world? We demand equality of opportunity. Those are some of the signs. And thank you for letting me know, I'll be sure to verbalize those things too, right? And then all that is happening in front of the sign of the Sherrington Palace Hotel. The other picture that I showed was of demonstrators, mostly white males laying on the ground being arrested while demonstrating. Yeah, interesting, right? Okay, this also brings us to the same year that energy was translated to the San Francisco Auto Road demonstrations. Again, I'm telling you, this hour presentation is not, there are so many layers to all this, right? But I want us to have a chronology so that we can have all the pieces to have a dialogue with. So there's a lot here. So Auto Road, Van Ness Street. 200 demonstrators took to the Cadillac dealership of San Francisco. And Auto Road to protest against the discriminatory hiring practices. There were about nine black employees. None of them were able to be dealers. They were mostly waxers, janitors, and maintenance versus dealers or people with managerial positions. Only 23 out of 200, and over about 220 some odd dealers were African-Americans. So out of the total employed, the majority had nine employees who were maintenance. 23, the outside of that were the only African-Americans who were not in maintenance positions. Black Struggled in the US, the Black Struggle in the United States included and was embraced by people outside of the African-American community. That's something I think that is particularly shown through this demonstration. As a result of this demonstration, the dealership committed to increasing the numbers of employees. They signed a non-discriminatory hiring PACS. But ultimately due to, I would say division amongst the demonstrators, particularly the NAACP who were the leaders of this particular demonstration and a conflict over strategy, there were some gains made by the 64 auto row, but ultimately it's hard to follow up. So I always say that laws don't always necessitate change, but they bring attention to and they push things into the right direction. So here's a pretty famous picture. Thousands of actually over many days and weeks even shut down the Cadillac showrooms. Advocating for civil rights, advocating for equal employment opportunities. And this is all just from 63 to 64. So you can imagine mass demonstrations happening one after the other. I mean, you don't have to imagine it, I guess it's happening now, right? And you can just imagine and how that would feel now in that type of energy. Now, okay, I wanted to give a little bit of context in San Francisco, largely students, multi-ethnic, coming from different classes. For some of them, they might've been first generation college students, for others, they might've had much privilege, but many of them were called to the civil rights movement to bring about social change in their communities. Now in 1965, we're gonna go south to Southern California. We've all heard about the Watts uprising, yes? I'll talk about it. In 1965, Marquette Frye was pulled over for reckless driving. In altercation, after being pulled over between Marquette Frye, his mother's called to the scene. She starts to scold Marquette for essentially taking the car, a scuffle ensues between the officers, the mother and the Mr. Frye and bottles are thrown and things explode. One thing I also want us to know is that these isolated incidents, often in the urban centers, oftentimes issues of our instances of police brutality are in no way the only cause, but are more of a symptom of larger systemic, long-term, institutional and structural issues that African-Americans face when they came to the Jim Crow North and when they came to the Jim Crow West. So for me, you have a very volatile community that's already ready to explode. When I interviewed somebody from Bayview Hunters Point, who was around in 1966 to witness the events there, he's described it as just being any other day. Water balloon fights, it was hot, but underneath the surface, we all knew we were being mistreated. We all felt mistreated. And when there's an incident that triggers that feeling, things like uprisings can happen. And I don't call them riots because riots infer irrational acts of violence with no rhyme or reason. And an uprising is an act of political protest, maybe not rational, I'm not rationalizing violence, and maybe not even getting any real results, but it's an expression often of the frustrations of a people who feel they have no other options left. And so I wanted to think about that. Now, the what's uprising was, I mean, huge amounts of damage. I don't have the exact figures with you, but I mean, this is, wow, this is happening in Los Angeles. Many people, many public officials and residents, quoting Jean Theoharis, were shocked by the showing of black anger. But do we think black people were shocked? Yes, no, maybe so? Sorry, I'm to turn into a teacher, right? No, I don't, they weren't. It's like trying to tell people water is wet. This is my reality. I've lived this my whole life. And so on one hand, right, you had people who were outside of that oppression or who had the privilege not to experience that oppression as being shocked, but for blacks, Watts was an awakening. It was also a warning. It was a realization, but also a confirmation of their circumstance. Quoting Sirius McConaughey from 1973, he states that Watts had come to symbolize and glorify the rising up of an oppressed people. Such an ideology can serve as a rallying point for collective action. It can help ensure solidarity, act as a model for further violence, and justify similar future actions. So now we'll take it back to San Francisco momentarily. But I want us to keep in mind, when we're taught history, so let's talk about history making for a minute. We're taught these little dots on the line. This is an event that happened. We move on. This is another event that happened. But really what I hope we have to start doing, particularly with this history, is drawing the connections between these events. So we went from 63 to 64, right? An hour and 65 and Watts happens. Think about the crescendo of all those events. So African-Americans all over the country were reading the news, were watching what was happening, were studying and trying to understand, and those incidences in the Bay Area were informing civil rights activism all over the country really. So we'll get there. All right. I'm also trying to point out that there's a larger context for all this too. There's a culture of violence. This is a very violent time. And I just have a few events here just to highlight that, also for the sake of time, I can't get over everything, but I'm really trying to get us to see the forest, right? Not the tree, like Rafael Allen says. So in 63, you had the assassination of Kennedy. The assassination of Malcolm X in 65, February of that year. You had the Watts Rebellion in August. Now think about the impact of the assassination of Malcolm X, what that represented to the people, how that might have informed and even fueled the events that happened in Watts. And this has also happened in the larger global context of the Vietnam War. African-American soldiers are being put on the frontline and they're asking the same questions that black soldiers have been asking since every war here. What does it mean to fight for a country where I'm not seen as equal citizen? Should I fight for this country? And so the Vietnam War particularly, I think is important too, to bring up a couple points. So I'll go back to my lecture here. In 1954, the Brown versus Board decision was made. The Brown versus Board of Topeka, Kansas was a landmark Supreme Court case decision that ultimately made the segregation of people and particularly in this case, students in public accommodations, unconstitutional, overturning the 1896 Plessey versus Ferguson decision, right? And so that's happening simultaneously as we are entering into a Vietnam War. So I also want us to look at how we have these, the collision of we're entering into a war to spread democracy at the same time that's very violent within its nature, right? But also we're doing it at the same time as we're making civil rights legislation. Now, that legislation was very slow to move. Although the Brown versus Board decision was made, for years schools remained segregated. So in a lot of ways, we were making civil rights gains in name, but not in practice, right? And I think that the, that's something that's important for us to mention that there was a preexisting culture of violence that I think contributed to these violent urban uprisings that happened. It's not just the people are violent. They're living within a violent culture. They're living within the context of a war. And that war was something that they viewed as against them. When young black men and women try to go home and they have to worry about being pulled over or whether they're gonna be shot or killed by the police, that could be read as war in a lot of ways. So many young people live in war zones, period. And so I think that we have to look at the bigger picture, but also the smaller picture as well. So there is American paradox for the country passing this groundbreaking civil rights legislation while entering into one of the most violent wars, which was broadcast into homes. Televisions are pretty new, but in 1950, they were brand new. So also I want us to imagine thinking about the culmination of all these things that this is the first time that people are able to really see war in a real way. I mean, they're seeing the war right in their living rooms on TV, their friends, their family members, their fathers are dying and leaving. That also too is adding to this context too. And definitely the anti-war movements, which I don't talk about much in this presentation are also a big part of activism within the San Francisco Bay Area. That with more time, I hope to involve that. So I also, I say that because of all these things, there was particularly a level of violence that was seen as more acceptable because of the social and political climate, especially to repress movements and uprisings against for social change. So in many ways, I'm essentially saying that the responses to activism and uprisings during this time were very, very violent by the state and the violence is reflected in the oppression and both in the responses from the state. You follow me? So what I'm saying is that there were highly militarized responses to some of these collective acts of activism that only pushed us further into this violent culture that only added to the violent nature of the 60s. So that's more of what I'm talking about there. Okay, okay. All right, so now we get to the year 1966, really powerful year. 1966, both of us know is the year that the Black Panther Party formed in Oakland, California. But there were things that were happening in San Francisco on the other side of the bay. In the summer of 1966, and what I have up here just for, is just a newspaper clipping that reads, violence erupts in San Francisco. Robbery suspect Frank Jackson was in the Fillmore. He was definitely robbing somebody. And he was shot in the abdomen while robbing somebody by an off-duty police officer who he did not know was a police officer at the time. A crowd of 200 young people come to the scene as the officer is trying to call an ambulance. Now, remember the legacy of Watts. That's fresh in the minds of these young people. And one young person is quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle as saying, you know what happened in Watts and Chicago? That's gonna happen here too. Entitled, and that's from the San Francisco Chronicle 1966 entitled Fillmore's Warm Up. In many ways, you could have predicted that some sort of violence would happen. There was much tension between Black communities and the police who were extremely marginalized. They were kept from employment opportunities. In Hunter's Point alone, about half of the youth were unemployed. Well, I'll get there. I think I'm jumping ahead. So you have the summer of 66. Remember, we went from 63, 64, 65. Now we're in 66. All of this is informing. All of this is adding up. And it was surprising because people were like, San Francisco, that can't happen in San Francisco. It warmed up, but it's never gonna get too hot. San Francisco is liberal. San Francisco is, Jim Crow doesn't exist there. We don't have to worry about those things. Until they had to worry about it. Now I have, Tuesday, September 27th. That same year, 1966, Matthew Peanut Johnson was 16 years old at the time. Stole a car from Bacon and Gerard Street, which is now near Martin Luther King Middle School. A week before that, just to humanize him a little bit, you know, he was a friend to many people in the community. He was a good kid, as people described him. But he did it, he lacked a job. A week before that, he was trying to seek employment. He did, made a mistake, which is what young people do. Should he have stolen the car, no. But that's not the case. We have a criminal justice system and people are supposed to be guaranteed the right to do process. Matthew Johnson was denied that right. And while running on the hill, on Navy Road, he was running away from the officer. He was shot in the back by the officer. He fell into a ravine. This is in the, I'd say early to late afternoon. So it was in broad daylight. Nurses from the equal employment, I just had my lecture here, nurses from a nearby EOC center essentially come to try to bring some life, but they're not trained, they're not trained. And he essentially bled out in front of the people in his community. A crowd of people starts to form around the ravine and look down onto the body of Matthew Johnson. Police are called. And just to give you a little bit more information about that, it was a full about, I'd say 45 minutes before an ambulance arrived at the scene. So even if there was a chance of Matthew Johnson living, the slow response essentially guaranteed his death. The officer Alvin Johnson is quoted as saying, "'I did what I had to do, but I'm sure sorry it happened." It was determined some four hours after the violent incident that the car was in fact stolen. So the officer didn't know that the car was stolen at the time. Matthew Johnson was young, got scared and ran. And yet the shooting officer had only probable cause and no definitive information at the time of the encounter to confirm that the vehicle was in fact stolen. You know, it's unfortunate that we criminalized the victims. Was he a perfect no? He was a young man who was doing the best that he could, who definitely did not deserve to die in the way that he did. Most of my research has centered on 1966 and Hunter's Point. So and it's having grown up there, it's something that's very near and dear to me. I feel like I didn't really understand why my neighborhood was the way it was. I felt like I was growing up with the ghost in Hunter's Point. Something had happened here that I didn't know about. And once I found out that after the shooting of Matthew Johnson, there were three days of civil unrest involving almost 2,000 national guards, California Highway Patrol, San Francisco local police. I mean, we're talking and I never knew about it. I never learned about it in my history class. It just happened. On the second day of the uprising in Hunter's Point after the shooting of Matthew Johnson, I wanna highlight a couple of things that are important to know. Young people organized amongst themselves, they tried to reason with the national guards and the police. Let us get the young people off the streets before you come in and shoot. Let us work with you. And other activists from all over San Francisco came to Hunter's Point with that intention. So not every person in the streets of Bayview Hunter's Point was there to break a window. There were people in fact there trying to essentially engage in communal policing. Let us police ourselves. We understand what's going on. Don't shoot us. Let us just get our people off the streets. There was word of a sniper. And I found two sort of conflicting stories. On one hand, one story that I read in the spokesman which was a local paper in the Bayview Hunter's Point area stated that there was a rock that was thrown at an officer. He says, I'm hit over the radio and there was talk of a sniper. Oftentimes the threat of a sniper was something that was used to justify aggression and these kinds of protests and often there was no evidence of any sniper. But what I'll tell you, in my own writing of this history, I tried to paint these people, they were all innocent people in some way. And they were, but that's the point I'm trying to make is that the people started to fight back and what I'm hearing from people is by the second day started to maybe even shoot back too at the police officers. So we're talking about three days of armed conflict between Hunter's Point residents, Highway Patrol and National Guards. This is a picture from the spokesman of the National Guards. One really tragic incident that I think sparked a lot of the violence is the National Guards line up at Third and Newcomb and shoot into a crowd of 200 unarmed youth, shoot into the Bayview Hunter's Point Community Center where there were actually children inside and from there on the violence ensued. By the third day there were over 300 arrests, 10 people were shot and there were no reported deaths. However, in collecting the oral histories, people talk about into the night hearing people being shot, hearing ah, you know, I mean, so the history has really been rendered invisible. It's surprising to me that I didn't find out about this until my senior year in college having grown up in San Francisco my whole life. And this is in September, right, of 66. One thing that I don't have here that I have in my other presentation where I just focused on 1966 is the funeral procession of Matthew Johnson. And I think I do want to show it to you. So just bear with me for one moment. See if you're gonna do that. I just want you to see the community coming together. I'm gonna show you two images, okay? This image is from the spokesman paper. Anybody from Hunter's Point ever been to West Point? You know, this is, look familiar, right? This is a image of some of the housing conditions that people lived in Hunter's Point. So again, it's not just about the singular incident, but the conditions that drive people to make decisions like Matthew Johnson did. And the shooting of Matthew Johnson was an act of police brutality that was a quick death. But there's also something that happens very slowly, a slow death that happens through communal neglect, a slow death that happens when you don't invest in schools, a slow death that happens when you don't put money into the infrastructure, when you allow a community, the economic base to essentially be pulled out and rot and do nothing for that community. So you know, you have those two things and those incidents of police brutality only really highlight the larger long-term struggles that people are living within. So I wanted to point that out too, but I also want us to see just the community coming together to show how beloved Matthew Johnson was as a person to humanize him a little bit because he was a person. He was a young man who lost his life. Did he make the right decision? No, but he lost his life unjustly. And so thousands of people came down to honor the life of Matthew Johnson. And you know, I think that people really didn't talk about my grandparents, my great aunts, my mom didn't talk about 1966 because some things are hard to remember. Some things are hard to talk about. And I think the way that my grandparents tried to protect me from what they experienced was by tucking it down and not talking about it. So there are deep wounds that the black community has here that have really gone unhealed and are only made deeper by the recent incidents of police violence and shootings that we see more recently. So just honoring the life of Matthew Johnson here. This is up third near Oakdale, the funeral procession. And I actually talk much more about 1966. So if you're more interested, just stay posted. But I'm trying to give a broader context for this presentation. Placing the events of 1966 into civil rights in the Bay Area. This is footage from the actual the San Francisco Historical Center upstairs on the sixth floor. And this is an image from Hunter's Point that day. This is another image. This image was also featured in the Bay View paper as well commemorating the 50th anniversary. These are people being marched out of the opera house after it had been fired into. Oh, last semester, excuse me, last year, teachers talking semesters, I commemorated the 50th anniversary of what happened in 1966 to 1966 uprising. So you were asking about this photo? This is of the opera house in 1966. This is the second day, so this is September 28th. And these are police sort of walking people out of the opera house after it had been shot into. Now the Bay View Community Center was right near, it's not in existence anymore, but it was right near the opera house. And that was one of the buildings that was shot into. So the opera house is still around because of the work of activists there who went to preserve it. But I just wanted us to know that history is attached to that space, that building. So, and you know, in October, actually October, it's supposed to be October of 1966, really a month and a half, really, really close to when, this is supposed to be October, very close to in Oakland, California, QEP Newton and Bobby Seale co-found the Black Panther Party. So they meet in June and then in October of 1966, they co-found the Black Panther Party. Is the uprising the direct cause of the founding of the Black Panther Party? No, not at all, that's not what I'm trying to argue. But what I am trying to say is that uprisings like that that happened in San Francisco, like that that happened in Chicago, New Jersey, Rochester, all over the country, helped to fuel an ideology and helped to fuel a Black Power movement. So, the Black Panther Party is formed just a little a month over, a month after that. And as I say, it's not a direct cause, but they fuel the ideology of self-defense. Something else I wanna say about Bayview, and then I'm gonna transition back to 1966 because I think it's important for us to think about gender and women and the role that women play. What I also think is great about Bayview Hunter's point is that women were leaders, women were activists, within that community, in a way that we don't necessarily see when we look at civil rights in the South. Yes, there were female activists, but they were often pushed to the back. They were allowed to organize, but not necessarily allowed to speak at the pulpit, speaking metaphorically. And so, women in Hunter's point were particularly active to talk about the activism, not just the incident. Many of those women were known as the Big Five. Anybody ever heard of those women? The Big Five, these were Ms. Eloise Westbrook, Oceola Washington, Bertha Freeman, Ruth Williams, and Rosalie Williams, all were major activists and advocates for the rights of Bayview Hunter's point advocates well before 1966. And I feel like the events of 66 in Hunter's point further galvanized them. So we really see women taking the lead, advocating for services for their children, better housing conditions, better schools, running, opening the Bayview Hunter's point community center, going all the way to Washington DC even to advocate for better housing conditions. Many people don't know this, but Bobby Kennedy, following a year after the 1966 uprising, came to Bayview Hunter's point, came to the Bayview Hunter's community center to talk to the people there about the conditions. So this presentation is not a celebration of violence, but I do think the violence is an expression of frustration. But oftentimes these collective acts of violence, while they may not bring about the type of systemic change that's needed to completely change things, they do bring attention to, unfortunately. I also think that it's important that we think about American history. Oftentimes if we look at the American Revolutionary Period, think about the concept of rioting and how important that was to the American Revolutionary Cause, to the American Colonials who were slave owners themselves, right? So sometimes social rebellion is necessary for social change, but we paint some people in history as heroes, and we paint others as criminals for essentially engaging in the same thing, right? And so I wanted to make that point. I also wanna say that Bayview Hunter's point, like Oakland, which I'll get to momentarily, was an organized community. They organized themselves before, during, and after the incidents of 66. There was, just to name a few of the organizations, there was an interblock council of Hunter's Point, the Sunnydale Citizenship Citizens League, the Bayview Parent Action Group, the Hunter's Point Democratic Club, and the Bayview Community Center, just to name a few of the organizations. Hunter's Point also had one of the first neighborhood co-ops. So Rainbow Groceries was not something that was just for people in the mission, right? The co-op came out of the need for people to have access to quality foods, and they started one in Hunter's Point, one of the first in the city. So when we talk about activism and organizing, it's not always on the streets, it's not always a confrontation like 66. Sometimes it's just about basic rights, which is what the Panthers wanted, food, bread, you know, bread, land, and power, essentially. So if we go across the bridge, a month, roughly about a month later, in Oakland, California, the Black Panther Party forms. And what I think is important about the Black Panthers, because there's a lot of things to say about the Black Panther Party, and I hope that you guys go to Oakland, California to see the Black Panthers at 50, which is an incredible exhibit, analyzing the Black Panthers and its complexities, and it's up until the 6th, 26th. The Black Panther Party was iconic. It was larger than life, but they were as human as human could be in many ways. There was this image of Black militancy that has become very popularized in many ways people ran with, but it has hidden the larger social justice agenda that is at the core of who the Panthers were. Has anybody seen that exhibition in Oakland? What's one of the most interesting things you found out? Cause I think it's the same as mine. What did you guys find out there about the Panthers that maybe you didn't know? Anything that you found out from that exhibit that you didn't know before? Yeah, the women, two thirds of the Panthers were women, you know, and that's, you know, and in many ways I always knew that there were female women and were leaders within that, but that many, you know, was something that was important to me. So when we think about the ways in which the Panthers were organized, it's largely due to the role of women critically analyzing the needs of their communities and addressing those needs. You know, the women were leaders, they were strategists, they weren't just cooking breakfast, right? For the young people. But I think that the Black Panther Party, the image of militancy is what people ran with. Huey P. Newton stated himself that people got carried away with the guns, but the community programs were the core. So Black Power, now as we go into this era of Black Power, this is, again, post-March on Washington, which in many ways was seen as this great, you know, respectable protest, but, you know, in that same year, a few months later, four little girls are bombed and killed in a church. A few years later, we have these uprising and incidents. So I think that their morale was low and people understood at this time, activists understood that while we can have legislative gains, if we don't make those gains real in our lives, if we don't have power to exercise those rights, then we essentially don't have anything. So the Black Power movement wasn't about black people putting on black berets and becoming violent, it was about demanding, not asking for, the rights that they were owed. And I think that in a capitalist society where one's life can be determined by what zip code you're born into, can be determined by the resources allotted to your community, to your school, those types of questions are really important, you know? So the legacy of the Black Panther Party, while far from perfect at all, and again, these are human beings, it still instilled a sense of purpose and pride through black eyes, for black eyes, not through the eyes of a society trying to understand black lives. And that's what's important about their legacy, I think, to me. I don't have time to show the video because I wanna get through all this. So we're gonna keep going and if there is one video that I think is really important to show that brings connections together. So okay, we've got, we went from 63, 64, 65, 66, wow. So much happening in the Bay Area already and it keeps going, 1768 to 69, you have the student strike at San Francisco State. I graduated from State, anybody go to State, graduated from San Francisco State in this room? Yeah, what's going on? Hello, welcome Gator, yes, right? And I love San Francisco State, but I love the history of it more. I mean, when we think about the first school of ethnic studies in the country, I've said it three times because it's important that we recognize that, that they create a model that essentially has been implemented throughout and with Cornell University, San Francisco State was at the center of those student-led movements, right? So let me get through this. It was led by a black student union, again, young activist students and other affiliate student groups. So there was not just black students working together. You had the Third World Liberation Party, you had all these groups of people, Asian students, Native American students, Chicano and Chicana students all coming together to fight for equal access to higher education, a curriculum that was more reflective of them, faculty, not just faculty, tenured faculty, in these positions to make real change. And so San Francisco State was a model of protests and also created a model of curriculum that was well ahead of its time. And I think that's very important to keep in mind. It was one of the longest protests on any campus. There was much bloodshed. Reagan and the president of the school used a lot of condoned and utilized much violence to try to crack down, so to speak, this movement that these students were on the right side of history, if you ask me. They were ahead of the time. So shame on to those officers and to those people that brutalized them and beat them and jailed them. Students spent time in jail for this, some for years. So I think that part of why I'm also speaking is so that we know what was given for what we have because if we don't know what is given then we don't know why we have to fight to keep it. So this came from a very out of much struggle and again they created the first school of Exnic Studies after March of 1969. Now what's interesting is that the president of Cornell University actually is in many ways ostracized for negotiating those terms and bringing about some of that change too. So San Francisco State creates a model for the whole country. I do wanna show you this video. Now this is from the San Francisco State University Archive. Now this is Eloise Westbrook. Remember I mentioned, let's go back, we're connecting dots here. I mentioned the Big Five, five female activists from Bayview Hunters Point. And I just will talk about why that's important momentarily. How people? Because I'm the ghetto community. That was Danny Glover. What's important about that video for me is it connected a lot of different things for me. I was like, wow, I've been studying Bayview Hunters Point this whole time, studying these women in the context of Hunters Point only. I didn't know that they were at the protests, but it makes sense. They're sons and daughters were at San Francisco State. So it's no coincidence that Eloise Westbrook and Ruth Williams spoke at the San Francisco State Strike or that Black Panther Party members regularly visited the BSU at San Francisco State. That young people who might have participated in the uprising, whether they were youth officers trying to get people off the streets or whether they were involved in that might have been some of the students at San Francisco State. They might have been the younger brothers and sisters of people who participated in the auto row strike in 63 or in the males' driving strike. So we have to start drawing these connections. Residents, they might have been residents or participants in the Fillmore or Hunters Point uprising or they might have been Black Panther Party members themselves in Oakland, California. These events do not happen in isolation from one another. They tell us a much broader story about San Francisco about activism here and about the nature of activism here and how social change comes about. Social change doesn't come from one isolated incident. Social change comes from alliance building, people drawing connections and working across those lines. Those mothers did not have to come to San Francisco State to speak, but they knew they had to if they were gonna keep that momentum going, right? Because they knew that ultimately it would better the lives of residents in Bayview Hunters Point. Just as those white students got on the picket line for Black workers at males' driving, it's gonna better my life and my community if I strike. And in the Bay Area, there were alliances between races, civil rights organizations, and everyday citizens who were engaged in generating social change in their communities in ways that I think are very unique to the Bay Area and that can show us away a model for how to go forward. Social change only comes through unification, working across those social barriers imposed through socialization, working through and across political and ideological differences. And what we see happening, what I see happening, and I hope you see, is this crescendo of events that kept the momentum going through the decade of the 60s that created a momentum that was so strong that it couldn't be stopped and that essentially it created civil rights groups like the Black Panthers and programs like the first school of ethnic studies that would show the country what is possible if we come together. The San Francisco Bay Area showed people what was possible through unification in ways that were just not possible. But also San Francisco is a place that both highlights the paradoxical nature of Jim Crow in the West as well as what is possible through sustained and focused political organization. So what I'm not doing here is trying to expose some grand plot of all these various groups coming together to overthrow a system. That's not what I'm trying to do. Nor did the, I'm trying to show that I feel like that's an outdated and uninformed view. What I'm trying to get us to understand is how social movements come about. The civil rights movement did not happen in the vacuum. It's a part of a link on a chain of resistance and it's only strong when they come together, right? And the people involved did not know what would come. They didn't know that a school of ethnic studies was gonna start. They didn't know that Bobby Kennedy was gonna come to Bayview. They didn't know that 50 years later people would be holding up black fists or Beyonce would be dancing in the Super Bowl dressed like a black panther. They didn't know this but they did it because they knew what was right and they had to do something right. And sometimes that meant putting aside their political differences for a moment, for a strike, for a demonstration to bring about social change. And they understood that their successes were connected to. And I, so I wanna say a little bit about this and I wanna leave some time for questions. So I already mentioned this but Miss Westbrook was a part of a 15 person delegation that went to DC on behalf of Hunters Point to secure housing and funding for better housing conditions. These are mothers, everyday people, you know? And Miss Williams operated the Bayview Community Center and helped to keep the historic Bayview. She's the reason why the opera house is still around. It was gonna be demolished. So she kept it around, yeah. So these are everyday average women who we wouldn't see as activists but they were activists. And again, who is an activist in the Bay Area, there's not, I don't think one definition, you know, here. I went to school with people from all economic boundaries, you know, across lines. I might go hang out in a mansion and then I go to my little one bedroom. But that's what San Francisco does. We're so close together. It forces us to live within each other's experiences sometimes whether we like it or not. I didn't mind it but some did. Okay, so these are some of the connections I made earlier that students from San Francisco State were also community members. You had mothers from Bayview, Hunter's Point. You had Black Panthers making regular meetings. But in 68 also, Martin Luther King is killed. Wow. I mean, wow. Just take a moment to think about how that perpetuated and furthered the cause. And what's sad too is that, you know, what we see after the assassination of Martin Luther King who was moving towards systemic change. He understood that we could not get rid of racism in this country unless we got rid of poverty and the economic oppression that people experienced is that that's also, there's also a larger context that's happening here too that pushes it. There was a lot of violence after he was killed which is again an expression of that frustration. Okay, two things I feel like are very important to mention and I'm just gonna, I can't go over them a lot but I think that it's very important to talk about the Asian-American experience here too, right? And it's not just Chinese, there's more than that. You know, there's South Asia, there's a lot. But the battle for the eye hotel is happening in 68 and for me, it really brings a lot of connections together. The International Hotel was the residence for many Filipino and Filipino residents who had been living here since the 20s. And this term urban renewal and urban development, you know, also oftentimes comes with displacement. So in 1968, the company, the contracts that owned that began to give eviction notices and students, they formed the United Filipino Association and students and tenants activists all come together to fight against that. So again, you have this coming together of student activists, UC Berkeley, San Francisco State, people from all over coming to fight for the rights of these citizens here. And lastly, and I don't have time to show the video, but in 1969 to June, 1971, also we have to remember there is the takeover of Alcatraz led by Richard Oaks and these are again, young college educated people who are leading these movements. They form a group called the Indians of all tribes and that occupation ended in many ways what people say is unsuccessful, but what does success mean to an activist? What is success in grassroots efforts? I don't always think it's about the gains meeting the demands. They ultimately didn't get that land but they raised a consciousness. They brought about an awareness to these issues that is important too. And as people are trying to fight against a Dakota pipeline now and still fighting for the right to their own homelands, understanding this history now is more relevant than ever. And so some other important questions to think about is how do you develop a city without unjustly displacing the people? And when you move a people, what else do you displace? You disrupt the culture, you disrupt the community, you break apart families. And so these are issues that we're still grappling with to this day in the tech industry as I am pushed out of my own city. I work at City College San Francisco and I can't live in San Francisco. What about that, right? My grandmother's house is on California Street, 3059 California Street, and I'll never be able to buy that house back. I can't afford it, it's worth millions of dollars. So my family story is so common but I think that if we think about the story of Alex Nieto, he's not African American but I think this is a really important connection to gentrification. He was in a neighborhood that he had been in his whole life and I'm really gonna give credit to Salima Handkins for really kind of putting this, the intersection of all these things together. She spoke at City College just a few days ago and she made a really good point. She talked about how Alex Nieto, she's a lawyer that works against displacement in East Palo Alto, was a young person who was also a City College San Francisco student, even more context, who was waiting to go to work so he had a taser on him sitting in a neighborhood he had known his whole life. He knew this neighborhood his whole life, eating a burrito. A new member of the community sees him and sees this person who's been there their whole life as a threat. Police are called, shots are fired and he's dead. So for me, when I think about gentrification, I think it's definitely connected to issues of police brutality. It helps to create this narrative. Du Bois talks about in Black Reconstruction, this idea of the best and the worst put right next to one another. The highlighting that disparity between the haves and the have-nots and as long as that gap is widened, there'll be that distance and people won't understand or see him as a rightful member of that community. They just see a criminal and then he shot and killed in his own community. So I think that it's really important to talk and think about issues of gentrification because they are definitely connected to the same systems we're talking about, the same systemic oppression and also can also add to and create instances of brutality and displacement. So I think that Black San Francisco, they're trying to make a seem as if we're not here anymore but we're still here and I'm not going anywhere and it's a proud history. So I try to tell that story and I do think it's important that although we're going away in numbers, they can't erase our history. And Alice Walker said, if you don't document your own history, they'll come at a time where they'll tell you it doesn't exist, so that's what I'm trying to do. This happened, this existed here. So now we're all witness to that. They can't say that didn't happen. So yeah, very important connection. Thank you guys so much for coming out tonight. I'm the only Aliyah at City College, I'm pretty sure. So you can find me on the directory there, send students to our classes. Every semester we struggle to keep African-American studies open as a department because we don't have enough students in our seats. So if you care about a class, our department, show it by taking a class and that really makes a huge difference now. Also, I hope that this chapter on 1966 and Baby Hunter's Point will be between two covers next year. So that's something to also look forward to and stay in touch, reach out to me, document your stories, tell your stories, and I hope to see you again in the future. Thank you.